Is this clip the most ludicrous thing you've ever seen, or just one of the most ludicrous things? It's Stefan's therapy session from last night's Vampire Diaries, and it's Exhibit A for why I still love this show.

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Spoilers ahead...

So last night's episode was about both Salvatore brothers confronting their past traumas, and in the core of those traumas there was a little nugget of guilt or maybe self-loathing. Stefan is still freaked out about the summer he spent in the bottom of a quarry locked in a safe, drowning over and over — so Caroline gets the bright idea to lock him in that safe again. That doesn't work, until he's locked in there with Katherine, his former-vampire ex-lover, who points out the obvious: Stefan is really traumatized about being abandoned by the people he loved, who left him to drown over and over, plus Elena dumping him. This catharsis leads to humping, as so many good catharses do.

Oh, and a core part of Stefan's "therapy," as seen above, is reasserting control — he gets better at least in part because he won't kill Katherine when she's presenting her vulnerable throat to him. He needs to overcome his inner monster at least as much as he needs to feel safe again.

Meanwhile, Damon (and soon Elena) are locked in cells by the Augustine society, which experiments on vampires. And we explore Damon's five years of suffering at their hands in the mid-1950s — culminating in Damon and his friend Enzo cooking up an escape scheme that half worked.

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Half, because Damon left Enzo to die. And also, Damon's overcomplicated revenge on his captors left a massive trail of bodies, and a single traumatized heir to the Tortureford family in every generation — with the latest generation being Aaron Tortureford, who is horrified at his family's past but also at Damon's murder of everybody ever. So Damon's trauma winds up being very much tied up with him being a monster. And his past screw-ups definitely come back to haunt him — in the form of Aaron, but also Enzo, who is (not surprisingly) not actually dead.